WELCOME!

Around Town

Money

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

I've been in three cities in the last five days. On my flight the other morning, I tried to connect to the wifi on the plane. The system said there was an unknown error processing my debit card.

I tried a different card ... same thing.

I figured something wasn't working for the airline and went about my trip.

The next morning, I was headed out again and while at my gate, waiting to depart, I went online to order Leighton's dress and shoes for our trip to New York to see Annie on Broadway.

At the point of checkout, my credit card was declined.

So I tried another.

Declined.

And another.

Declined.

And another.

Declined.

I felt like Sandra Bullock in The Net. What the hell?

More importantly, I was ordering this dress at the last possible second to arrive in time for our trip and was two seconds from boarding a plane. My working mom guilt immediately rose two more levels.

I WAS COMPLETELY DECLINED.

Apparently, even my banks felt I had been traveling too much. (Working mom guilt up one more level).

Every single card and account I had was flagged for suspected fraud.

This sucked in a particularly bad way because I was on my way to rent yet another car and check in to yet another hotel in yet another city in a few hours.

It took me a while to call all of these banks to alert them to my whereabouts and assure them that I was making legitimate purchases.

Each bank representative asked the same question, "Did you call us to let us know you'd be traveling?" I assured Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and ING that I was not prepared to call them every two days to keep them apprised of my travel schedule.

I suggested we share a calendar instead. I also explained that I like to earn points and certain cards are good for certain pints ... one for airfare, one for hotel, one for meals etc.

I can't possibly be the only one with this seemingly complicated existence. Could I?

Either way, I will be traveling less for a while. My banks are happy, my little girls are thrilled and my working mom guilt is all but gone.

Friday, November 19, 2010

I am a process person. I gravitate toward maximizing efficiency, systematic approaches and organization in general. I wrote about this after Leighton was born clearly with more energy than I have now and continue to seek out methods for optimizing the management of our happy little home.

It is readily apparent to me that disorganization costs money. If I misplace something I need, then I have to buy it again. If the magazine subscription lapses, then it costs triple on the newsstand. If I forget to get gas before going into the city, then it costs me an extra few bucks to get home. Every time I lose the radio key to Leighton's school, they charge me twenty dollars. When the house is a mess, things get lost or broken and need to be replaced. This list is ostensibly endless.

Food is a HUGE offender. If I don't have food on hand in the morning for dinner that night, I might just order in or buy the super-expensive prepared foods at the deli. If I don't have time to take inventory and make a decent grocery list, then I wind up with moldy bread and ten extra rotten bananas a week later. If I don't have Leighton's snacks stocked at home, then she eats overpriced crap at the zoo, or store or museum or music class or wherever we are. If we're out of coffee, then Starbucks gets incredibly lucky. You get the picture.

We have managed this to some degree with meal planning while sticking to a budget. However, it was much easier when we ordered from Peapod - you can order late at night, the food is delivered and you can manage your lists with ease. However, we now live up the street from a wonderful grocery store (minus the Lulu Lemon contingent) and Peapod comes less frequently to this new house. So, I routinely forget to place my Peapod order and need to run to Sunset foods with increasing regularity.

As a way to combat this mental foolishness, I have devised a better meal planning system that will work for me, as well as Ryan, my parents, a nanny or anyone else that steps in to help us with a new baby coming. The cornerstone of my optimized meal plan (index cards) is as old-fashioned as it is reliable and I can't wait to put it to the test starting monday.

The current and soon to be outdated system is as follows:

Breakfasts, lunches and snacks are based off of an aggregate of weekly items - milk, juice, eggs, bread, chicken sausage, fruits veggies, mish-mash, crackers, lunch meat, cheese, yogurt etc. that we know we need - reduced to a weekly shopping list on yet another spread sheet.

We also have twenty one dinner meals planned and rotate seven for any given week. The ingredients and shopping list are included in the spread sheet and once we pick our seven, we shop off of said spread sheet.

This plan worked great when we were able to better manage our grocery shopping. It's just not working so well now that we make several trips each week and often run out to pick up dinner fixings at the last minute.

The solution ... index cards.

I will print the weekly shopping list for breakfasts, lunches and snacks and make sure we're stocked every sunday with those staples. That list will live on the fancy schmancy wall organizer in the kitchen, right next to the white board that holds the "All Out Of" check list for unexpected items.

I will reduce each dinner to an index card with the meal on one side and the shopping list of ingredients on the other. That way, if we need to run out for a meal or two at a time, very little thought or lead time is required. These cards will also reside in the organizer for ease in grabbing them on the way to the store.

This has to work. Otherwise, it's back to the drawing board. We'll see how it goes and I'll keep you posted along the way.

Over the next three weeks, I'll decide whether my index card system flies or flops. I'm happy to share twenty-one days of meals with you, as well. In the interim, please feel free to post any tips or tricks you have for managing the ongoing task of feeding your family.

Friday, November 12, 2010

I've been stewing for a week now since I saw my decimated benefits for 2011. My company was recently sold. The old parent company was a bohemoth, and the benefits were truly amazing. The new parent company is interested in maximizing our profits, and that coupled with corporate reactions to new medical insurance regulations means that my upcoming benefits are lean.

To put it plainly, I'm taking a significant pay cut with no real discussion as to how that's going to go down. If I were having this baby at the end of December 2010 instead of the end of January 2011, I would save a substantial amount of income in the form of health care, leave and other benefits.

I know I'm not the only one in the reduced benefits boat. It's just that I've never been one for timing could have caught a break had I gotten pregnant four weeks sooner. Still, Leighton's prenatal care, delivery and maternity leave only cost me $220 in 2009 and I received 100% of my salary for three months, so I guess I'll just mentally split the difference to keep from lamenting my perceived misfortune every five minutes until baby #2 is attending the college I can't afford.

The long short of this whole ordeal is that it created a big, unexpected, monthly expense for my family. In response, we are looking at ways to make up the difference and it's not a simple task. If it's tough for a family with two people gainfully employed with decent salaries ... how do people with less make it all work?

We try hard to not be wasteful, to buy what we need, and to save money. But, I have a sneaking suspicion that Suze Orman would still rip us a new one if given the opportunity. So we decided to take a closer look at our financial situation.

We have a master spreadsheet. We've had it for years, and I'm in charge of updating it. Much like the spreadsheet I created to plan our wedding, I sometimes refer to it as the "disrespect sheet". Thankfully, we have now recommitted ourselves to actually using it to measure progress.

The disrespect sheet has a separate tab for each thing or category "Savings" "Retirement" "House" "Condo" "Revolving" "Student Loans" etc. All information for that account is on each tab and the total in or owed on each account is at the bottom. Then all of those totals are linked to a "Balance Sheet" tab that also has a box for other monthly expenses - utilities, groceries and the like.

The Disrespect sheet is encrypted. And, if anything ever happens to me, the only password Ryan needs to remember to get our affairs in order is the one that let's him into this damn document.

Then, our paychecks are automatically deposited into our join account minus an allowance that we each give ourselves, that goes straight to our individual checking accounts. Expenses are paid from the joint account. If we want to go out to dinner, buy new clothes, take a vacation or buy presents, that money needs to be saved up from our "allowance". This is the hard part.

The whole regime is somewhat exhausting, and there's not much left over at the end of every month anyway, but at least we can see where our money goes and try to figure out where we're going to come up with the extra cash we need. It keeps us from ever arguing about money because it's all out in the open and we're both responsible for it.

Money issues are a leading cause for divorce and unhappiness in marriages, so I guess I'm wondering how other people limit money disputes or what methods are employed to solve them. Does one person in the house handle the finances? Do you keep every receipt? Use Quick Books? Do you have a disrespect sheet too? What happens when the unexpected occurs?

Do you clip coupons? Ride a bike to work? Buy second-hand toys? Shut off the cable? Pause retirement contributions for a while? Use credit cards? Sell some stuff on eBay?

We've done all of these things at one time or another and I know there are better suggestions out there. Or, maybe we're just players in a fixed game - floating along, business as usual, hoping this whole economy thing blows over before the bills come due.